The Mother of Universe was once very young and alive. As a maiden, her spirit was not yet caught in objects. She danced in the Winds and slept in the Oceanic Depths of Existence.
As she ripened, she went everywhere, giving birth to everything. When captured into holy objects, she showed herself as young, fat and pregnant, but as the universe has aged, these young mother goddesses became icons of her much younger offspring.
As the coil of life has been woven, the Mother became beyond ancient and lost to humans. She was rediscovered in West Africa at an open air market after a hundred year burial in a basket of primordial fabric, long unremembered.
The Mother of the Universe traveled across the sea to another continent . She awakened into a modern world and soon came to live with me, a white woman. How utterly strange for her, standing in a beam of sunlight in my studio, surrounded by electric lights, music, heat without fires, glass windows; and being accosted by a strange breed of people so unlike those first born on this planet.
“Where did she come from,” you ask, “before living with you, before Africa, before mothering the human race?”
She birthed trillions of life forms all over the universe. Her beginnings, the reason she exploded into existence, was carried by cosmic winds near and far populating the darkness with seeds, is anyone’s guess. Why is there a universe? Because there just is.
The Winged Serpent impregnated her seeds, enlivened them, co-creating time itself with the kernels of life spread thru the galaxies. The Winged Serpent has also disappeared into the wilds, hidden beneath jungle, stone and water. Forgotten by the worlds, but not each other, the Mother and the Winged Serpent of Time long to see the light of day in each other’s eyes.
Once they were paramours, Lovers of the Universe, the Sacred Pair, the Makers of Life, Then they were discarded on our planet because humans grew towards darkness and were guided by ignorance and forgetting.
The Mother and the Winged Serpent of Time have long been separated. Recently, the whispers of who they used to be are being heard. Little by little, in the consciousness of the Earth Peoples; the Sacred Pair are beginning to live again.
On my altar in the East stands a small skinny copper woman with small awry breasts, skinny bow legs, toothpick arms. She has a large basket balanced on her head and a bucket clasped in her hand. Her skirt contains the lands of the earth scratched in rough lines. Her earlobes, the most modern thing about her, sport large gage holes. She is a primitive scrawny thing worn by carrying the burdens of creation, bringing a bucket of water to nurture that which she has given birth. She originated far from here; and more recently traveled from Africa to Georgia and then to Oregon. She wonders, “How will I contribute to the birthing of a sustainable, sacred society which honors creation?”
My sister, Naomi stooped at my altar and picked up The Mother of the Universe. I began telling how I came to have her. With a violent vehemence, Naomi stopped me.
Her face pleasantly arranged for the first ten minutes of our reunion took on a stridency; surprising and alarming me. “You right here are is what is wrong right now. You think you can consume your way into spirituality. You think you can buy and own the spiritual practices and objects of others, appropriate their holiness for your own selfish desires.”
“A friend, a black friend, brought me this from Africa.” I stuttered trying to get out my story.
“I don’t really care how you got this, she doesn’t belong in your home. She belongs in Africa with her ancestors. You make me sick. You have no idea who you are or who YOUR ancestors are.”
“Uh, well, uh….” Unsure how to treat this attack, I puzzled how to proceed. “I don’t really care for the way our ancestors behaved,” I tried. This felt lame. “I can’t find a time our ancestors weren’t wrecking civilizations and taking land.”
Naomi practically spat at me, “That’s it in a nut shell. You are taking somebody’s most holy of objects and using it to play Indian. Look at your alter. It has Chinese, Native American, Catholic and African objects all over it. None of it is your own heritage except the taking of others’ things and ideas. You can never understand their true nature, never have the meaning of this woven into your heart by a collective vision. Instead you have stolen it from where it belongs, further fracturing our indigenous cultures.”
“I think you mistake me. Really. I haven’t stolen any of this. It was all given to me or sold.” I managed to say.
“Sold. You can’t buy a spiritual object. They come from a long relationship with the cosmos.” She lectured, making many false assumptions about me in the process.
When she was leaving, she still held the Mother of the Universe. “She is coming with me so that I can make sure she is returned to Africa. We should all desire to return to our OWN indigenous roots.”
“Frankly, that is what I am attempting to do”. My anger escalated. “I would like to practice living in balance, with a structured world view that is nature/cosmos based. This is why I study the Meso-American calendar, because they have offered to us their ways so we too can walk in balance in the world. I don’t steal their stuff. They have given it to all humans as a way to recover and remember who we are. I am not copying them. I just try to live as honestly as I can, building on indigenous concepts, and internalizing their sense of time and metaphor to imbue sacred meaning into life. I don’t pay people to heal me or ask them to pay me. I’m trying to have peace in my life.”
Naomi’s scorn did not lessen. She was as furious as she had ever been. As she always was, since she was small. A fury fed by something I would never understand.
“Do you want to know how the Mother came into my presence, or do you want to march out of here with your superior attitude and this figurine?”
Gathering her backpack, Naomi pressed her already thin lips hard together, slashing her warrior face with fury. She turned towards me still clutching the Mother as if the figurine was filling a hole in heart.
I began witnessing a transformation.
Naomi seemed possessed with the Mother, but not in a good way. Her hair sparked, the sunlight and dust motes were frenzied around her. An unearthly voice arose from the previously compressed lips.
“I am the Mother of the Universe.”
I froze. Spirit speaks and I am overwhelmed with fear. I’ve asked Spirit to go easy on me, so I don’t lose my mind when reality bends. Reality was bending in front of my eyes.
“Lilly, I came into your life because you asked me to. You called my name and requested my presence. I am Mother of the Universe, not Mother of the African tribes, or the Basques, the Celts, the Creeks, the Mayans. I am the original ancestor of you all. I belong to no one and no one has my permission to take me anywhere. I am here of my own violation. Put me back on the altar. My job, at this moment is to midwife this solar system into a new dimension. Leave me to my work.”
Naomi stopped speaking. She blinked. I gaped at her. The blaze of light subsided.
